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Things which are not helpful

Today, I've spent a lot of time banging my head against the brick wall of bad or mad search design.

First up was the Scottish Government, with its contribution to "thwarting any attempt at a search", by somehow managing to date various items as being released on October, November and December...of this year. So looking for recent items was impressively pointless. As was the fact that the search was also giving over 300k results.

Looking forward to that Forced Marriage report in December.

Then, I went into the Scottish Parliament website, to try doing a search in the Official Report. Top tip: don't do this. Ever. Use Google to search the Parliament's website instead.

Mainly because, if you can get the report to return hits, then you get to wade through the results, blindly. And blindly it is, because the search doesn't give you any idea of how many pages of results you've got, or any shortcut to get to specific points/leapfrog to a further point. So if you know when something happened, and just want to get to that point in time, you need to click...and click....and click...hoping to get to where you know you want to be, but not knowing how long it will take, to move through the unknown number of pages....

So yeah: just Google it. It's less stressful, I can assure you.


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